Coastal Resilience Long Island

Coastal Resilience Long Island: A Case Study from The Nature Conservancy

The shores of Long Island, New York, have highly developed lands in the coastal zone, much of it only inches above sea level. Long Island stakeholders have indicated a need to visualize and understand how they can make informed planning, zoning, acquisition, and permitting decisions that will increase the area’s resilience to coastal hazards in the short and long terms.

The Nature Conservancy's (TNC) Coastal Resilience project addressed these issues by compiling social and natural resource data, inundation scenarios, and spatial analysis results in an interactive Web mapping tool. Decision makers can use this tool to assess alternative future scenarios that address sea level rise, storm surge, and community vulnerability.

Project Overview
Read TNC’s project synopsis to understand the motivations, partners, and results of this project.

For additional project details

How Did They Map It?
Learn about the coastal inundation mapping methods found in the Coastal Inundation Mapping Guidebook that TNC used to develop the inundation layers for the Coastal Resilience project.

How Did They Assess Vulnerability?
Get details on TNC's ecological and socioeconomic assessment methods, including how they incorporated census data mapping techniques found in the Toolkit Census Data Mapping Methodology.

How are states across the country, and New York local governments in particular, responding to sea level rise? Read the Local Land Use Response To Sea Level Rise prepared for TNC by the Pace University Land Use Law Center. Discover how some states are addressing sea level rise impacts. Also find local New York land use ordinances and regulations useful for addressing this problem.

The map details the Bellport Bay area along the southern shores of Suffolk County, Long Island. The two maps compare inundation between current high tide and sea level rise projected to the 2020s (IPCC A2 high end emissions scenario). This is illustrated alongside current marsh distribution and adjacent vacant parcels, part of an analysis of potential future salt marsh migration.